The Walking Dead’s Scariest Element Isn’t Zombies, It’s Memories

Image: Gene Page/AMC

We love apocalyptic fiction for the same reason we love horror movies: the pleasure of looking into the dark mirror of the worst-case scenario, and emerging unscathed. When we watch fictional characters struggle and suffer, it allows us to confront unimaginable fear and horror from a safe distance—not as a victim but as a tourist.

Just look at The Walking Dead, the AMC survival drama currently in the midst of its fourth season. Each year, the show promises that it will get darker, grimmer, more intense than ever before, and indeed it does. This has always been a show about the long game of the zombie apocalypse, exploring what happens to humanity not just in the moment when civilization falls apart, but in the years that follow. The problem about spending too long in darkness, though, is that after a while your eyes start to adjust. When a story is all valleys and no peaks, it doesn’t look like tragedy as much as a straight line.

The title of the most recent midseason premiere was “After,” an apt name for a show that—like the zombies themselves—is essentially a walking tombstone. The survivors don’t live in a new world so much as they live in the decaying body of the old one, the crumbling infrastructure rotting around them like meat falling off the bones. But for all its insistence on marching forward into humanity’s downward spiral, the recent midseason premiere gave us a rare thing indeed: a glimpse back at life before the zombie outbreak, courtesy of a dream sequence starring Michonne.

If we know anything about Michonne, it’s that she doesn’t like to talk about the past, which in practice meant that we didn’t know much about her at all. Yes, she’s an amazing katana-wielding badass, but in the absence of any biographical context, that’s all she is: a cipher with a sword. During an extended dream sequence in “After,” however, we finally got a glimpse of Michonne’s life before—eating sushi, drinking wine, and arguing about art with her boyfriend. It was shocking precisely because it was so quotidian, and so odd to imagine that she could have been a person like us before she became a walking Mortal Kombat fatality.

There’s a reason that Carol doesn’t talk about her dead daughter, and why Michonne doesn’t talk about anything at all. Silence is the narrative of survival. The survivors are like Lot’s wife traveling the long way out of hell, keeping their eyes straight ahead as though they’d fall to pieces if they looked back. And they might; the past is taboo because it’s dangerous, and that’s the very thing that makes it so magnetically attractive.

And therein lies the magic of the flashback, particularly for a show that lives in the aftermath of a world-changing catastrophe. It’s easy to look back at LOST now and dismiss it, but despite its eventual overuse of the flashback format, it’s a device that worked well for a very similar reasons. It not only helped flesh out the backstories of a motley crew of survivors, but also gave viewers a chance to venture outside the Island,a place that otherwise could not be escaped. While we may have finally moved the prison on The Walking Dead, we’re still trapped on the island that is the zombie apocalypse. And while there is naturally no way out for the survivors save death, I personally wouldn’t mind a trip elsewhere now and then.

Both showrunner Scott Gimple and creator Robert Kirkman have teased the idea of a radically different story structure for the second half of this season, though they remain coy about its exact nature, or whether Michonne’s dream sequence is a sign of more flashbacks to come. I hope it is. Part of what makes the Walking Dead comics so addictive, despite their relentless brutality, is the momentum that carries them from cliffhanger to cliffhanger in each monthly issue.

The TV show, on the other hand, has a tendency to marinate in pathos, to decompress its story in a way that makes it feel more like a slow-motion tragedy than an action series. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be occasionally difficult to endure, especially unleavened by either narrative variety or emotional relief. At what point does the series become a sort of misery porn—like Saw, but with sadness?

By necessity, The Walking Dead is a show about the people who manage to make it out alive, but the more time passes, it’s harder and harder to think of them as “winners.” The passage of time isn’t marked by growth or change but by damage, and how long they survive is a function of exactly how much they can absorb. Enduring in this world is its own form of punishment, sometimes, and death can start to look palliative, rather than punishing. (Just ask Michonne’s boyfriend, Mike, who it’s implied may have killed himself to to escape living in the after—and perhaps even killed their son as well.)

After devoting four seasons to the relentless grind of survival and emerging with no realistic hope in sight, the biggest struggle for the survivors isn’t finding a way to survive, it’s finding a reason to. Viewers, too, run the risk of becoming inured to it, of reaching a numbness that robs the tragic moments of their bite. Flashbacks would offer both respite and context, a chance to both momentarily lift the leaden veil of misery from the series and to better understand exactly how far the characters have traveled and what they’ve lost along the way.

When it’s the one thing you can’t bear to think about, the memory of a better and more painless world becomes the car accident you can’t look away from, the dream that makes waking up into your horrible, shitty life feel all the more unendurable. There’s a reason that most horror movies start out in relatively peaceful, even idyllic setting: it gives us something to juxtapose the horror against, a “before” picture that makes the “after” seem all the more terrible.

The scariest thing for a survivor to see in the rearview mirror right now isn’t a zombie—it’s the past. And if The Walking Dead wants to stay truly dangerous, that’s exactly where it needs to look.